Influencers Live Forever or Why the AI Apocalypse is Good for Advertising

Old jobs will become extinct and be replaced by new ones, and the outlines of these titles are already emerging – AI Ethics Specialist, prompt engineer, Digital Twin designer, AI auditor, etc. While some are unconcerned about the future of jobs and human labor, assuming that the transition from one job to another may be bumpy but will not reduce the need for work, others believe that artificial intelligence will have the capacity to completely replace human labor. Some predictions suggest that there is a 50% probability that by 2047, artificial intelligence will be able to perform all tasks better than humans, and by 2116, AI will be capable of fully replacing all professions, including new jobs that will arise as a result of AI. This has implications as it means that people could gradually become technologically redundant, completely unnecessary for work.

As Aaron Bastani notes in his FALC (Fully Automated Luxury Communism), AI has the potential to replace human labor, push productivity to the sky, and bring costs to zero, thus leading to extreme abundance and post-scarcity. Will this create a new useless class as Harari formulated or a fully automated luxury communism as advocated by Bastani?

AI Produces, People Consume

I believe it is entirely possible that in the near future, human labor will not be crucial for production. However, people will still be key to consumption, a critical component of capitalism. The main role of the population will be in its capacity for consumption, rather than its ability to produce. It seems to me that a significant number of new jobs will be created in industries related to the consumption of products, services, and content, that is, in industries whose main role is to shape consumer preferences.

This logic leads me to conclude that advertising, or its most recent offshoot – influencers – could be among the biggest winners of the AI revolution. An ever-decreasing number of people will work in ‘production’ jobs, while an increasing number will move into preference-influencing industries. Some trends support this claim. Content creators are the fastest-growing type of small entrepreneurs in the U.S., says LA Times at the end of 2021.

It is estimated that around 50 million people globally work in the influencer or content creator industries. Axios reports a recent study indicating that more than one and a half million Americans now work full-time as digital creators, representing a growth of as much as 7.5 times since 2020. And while we throw around numbers, we must consider that it is difficult to arrive at an exact number of employees because this form of work can be unstable, sporadic, and temporary, and sometimes serves as a secondary source of income, making concrete classification and precise quantification challenging.

Goldman Sachs predicts that the overall immediate market for the creator economy could nearly double in the next five years from today’s $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027. I am confident that this trend will continue due to a simple equation: there will still be a need for people as consumers, and a certain number will be needed to create and shape preferences for that consumption. In the end, we can imagine that people in the near future will engage exclusively in management, influencing, and innovation (although the question remains how long this will be necessary with the advent of increasingly sophisticated AI). Of course, among the jobs that will certainly survive for some time are demanding physical jobs – such as hairdressers, electricians, plumbers, or nurses – which machines and AI will not be able to replace easily as they require a combination of ‘solving complex problems, creativity, interpersonal skills, and a high degree of dexterity.’

The Need for Filters

Technology increases the need for influencers in another way. Besides reducing the need for human labor in production, technology also contributes to hyperproduction. Look around you, and you will notice that there are more things, more products, services, and more choices than ever before.

Technological advancement allows for a reduction in production costs and generally increases the number of products and services on the market. Today, consumers have an overwhelming amount of options whether they are buying an air conditioner, a kettle, choosing a hotel, or a university. The consumer landscape has never been richer and thus more complicated. In this complex environment, consumers seek shortcuts to make purchasing and consumption decisions about products, services, and content more manageable. That is why we, as consumers, seek authorities to whom we can outsource the job of filtering information, someone who will do the work for us – try and sift through the assortment and tell us the best options. Influencers, in this case, play a useful role as filters – people we trust who narrow down choices based on criteria we consider important. The greater the choice of everything – the greater the demand for people who filter will be.

In conclusion, technological advancement simultaneously causes two things: a) it reduces the need for work in manufacturing industries and redirects the workforce to those industries that deal with shaping preferences, and b) it enhances the hyperproduction of products and services, which in turn requires a filter to be manageable for the consumer. Both things increase the demand for influencers.

Can AI Influence?

Of course, a logical question arises as to why influencers could not also be replaced by AI in the near future? When it comes to classic advertising – we already have the answer.

The advertising industry has wholeheartedly embraced AI, and artificial intelligence can already design and write, making it ripe for promotion in the agency. AI-powered tools like Midjourney, Visual Electric, or Recraft are already heavily used for generating visuals, and ChatGPT effortlessly writes blogs, corrects copy, translates, polishes resumes, and responds to client emails. But when it comes to the influencer industry itself – I think the answer is somewhat more complicated.

Although the internet has recently been buzzing about virtual influencers and ‘synthetic spokespersons’, I would say there are two reasons why AI will not be able to so easily replace traditional (human) influencers.

The first is the issue of authenticity and credibility. Although AI influencers have existed for some time, people still trust real individuals more, especially when it comes to taste, style, or identity. AI has the ability to give an opinion – it can write blogs, record podcasts, or chat with you – but the question is how much you trust it once you find out you are not talking to a real person. True, I will have no problem trusting ChatGPT when it tells me which car is more cost-effective, but I would sooner trust a sommelier when suggesting wine, an experienced nose evaluating perfumes, or a food blogger when it comes to a restaurant review. (Okay, this is a bad example – never trust a food blogger when reviewing restaurants). Supporting this claim is a recent YouGov study revealing that 58% of Americans are reluctant to interact with an AI influencer, compared to 11% who said they are open to it. This first reason seems accurate for now, but it has the potential to become shaky in the near future, with increasingly sophisticated AIs.

The Power of Class

The second reason is of a class nature. If the influencer industry is to resist automation, it seems more likely to be due to the class to which influencers belong. One should never forget the political power of certain social groups – as Jurica Pavičić excellently pointed out, in Croatia during the transition, the first to suffer were ‘female industries’ like textile factories, while ‘male’ industries lasted much longer (e.g., shipbuilding and steelworks). Realistically, there is no reason why AI could not take over the jobs of entrepreneurs, financiers, or senior management (as David Graeber excellently observes in his masterful book Bullshit Jobs), but for now, we see that these ideas are not being seriously discussed in public. The reason for this, I assume, is that the dominant classes are politically much stronger and better equipped to protect themselves from attacks on their ‘purpose’ in society. Technology itself may be class-neutral, but its application never is.

It is likely that the current saga around AI regulation and intellectual property (IP) is an attempt to provide resistance from the ‘creative’ classes against the onslaught of new technology that threatens to take their place in the future economy, after that same technology has ‘inspired’ their own works. One of the first significant clashes in this conflict was the strike of the ‘Hollywood actors’ union (I put this in quotes because SAG-AFTRA is not just Hollywood actors but about 160,000 media professionals employed in film, television, radio, and gaming) and the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), which ended after 118 days and after the union fought for better compensation and clear restrictions regarding the use of AI technology that could threaten their existence. And as I write the last sentences of this article, news arrives about the largest copyright settlement in history in which Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI startups, settled with a group of authors and publishers, committing to compensate authors for about 500,000 works that it used to train its AI.

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And one small digression to conclude – one of the main indicators that our power is increasingly reduced to purchasing power is the fact that our main lever of political power is becoming boycott, not strike. I believe that this year’s boycott of stores, which gained momentum in Southeast European countries, was just a hint of what awaits us in the future.